161–170 of 227 posts
I tried to like it. I am a young person for whom IRC and Email seem very oldfashioned. But hey, it works and doesn't get me distracted.
I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of m…
No, you can't, and that is the problem. If your entire team primarily uses Slack to communicate, you are forced to constantly check it or you are not being a team player.
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I mute at here in all channels. It should be banned.
It's easily the most misused feature of Slack. Using @here in a channel is the equivalent of standing on your desk and shouting at everyone around you. So what happens is, like you, everyone starts muting it. And then you just have people shouting into the void.
Guess I get downvoted to hell but I won't care and share my thoughts: Slack is for most employees a way to socialize, to get connected, to be not alone because employees are actual lonesome creatures looking for community, looking for something to belong to. Heck, companies are for employees the same. They want to to find friends, to get laid, to network because they can't outside of their free-lunch-corp. If they ha…
I always found emails more productive for exactly that reason – you don't get so many pointless jokes and people have to set priorities whom to write what thing.
And if you really wanna have human interaction, just go there, make a 5 minute coffee break with them, have a little chat and be on your way. Or well, call, write them on the messenger of your choice, something like that.
Slack for work - not the best for actually writing useful messages, more like and working people see ping ping ping, go back in and respond, and on it goes.
Twitter for news - not the best for actually having productive discussions, more like and most people see ping ping ping, and go back in and like/retweet to their 5 followers.
Facebook for social - not the best for actually getting together (i.e. social life), more like and lonely people sit at home and see ping ping ping, and go back in and respond, and on it goes.
By now many of you know that I have spent the last 7 years working on a solution. The problem is that in order to build anything people will want to use, you need to spend at least half a million dollars on a realtime platform that can do stuff. If you want to see the problems and solutions, check out the videos on these pages:
https://qbix.com/blog (latest post)
Deep work? We live in a world of open offices, daily standups, max-four-hour JIRA tickets and pair/mob programming. The people in charge don't believe that "deep work" even means anything.
Most people in these environments usually know how to write software. Most of the software written isn't too complicated and doesn't require Deep Work. The design of these systems requires more thought, but the implementation should be fairly straightforward once you have a plan.
I worked at a startup where we were always having a hard time finding documents and conversations. Almost every other week we would try or consider adding another place to store documents as a solution for this problem. I saw from the beginning that this made no sense at all, that adding a new sharing service could only make the problem worse but I could only slow this trend down. A real solution would involve an int…
What doesn't work is a in-between-solution where you have >5 places each with its own outdated fragments of nothingness. This means whenever you decide on something you just will have to bite the bullet and use a meaningful amount of time to get everything into the new system. When the new system works, it people are more likely to honor it than contributing into something they feel is broken and somehow meaningless.
I'll play devils advocate. I like Slack, and having a group communication tool has only increased my productivity. How? - Having a place to easily search for issues others have had in the past. Sure, you can search emails or ask the same questions, but it's nice to search and find answers from other peoples conversations. - Integration for production alerting, customer feedback, and deployment pipelines. Instead of m…
Agreed. Its not just about the tool but how you use it. For us it actually helps to get less distracted. There are very few things that require a sub 3 hour reaction. So we just put a question in Slack even if it's for the person sitting right next to you. Eventually the person will answer when they have some time. Much better than constantly having someone tipping one your shoulder or calling you Just because you ha…
This is an overly harsh assumption. There are plenty of compelling real-world examples of organized, effective people being blocked by some small but urgent thing that's not their fault and requires a few minutes of attention from someone else.
If a dev just started on my project but the DB credentials I gave him aren't working (or whatever), that's on me. If my boss's boss jogs over to our office area asking who here knows Thing_X the best, I'm going to deign to remove my noise-cancelling headphones and accept the deep-work disruption.
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I don't get it. Do people open up slack, and then sit there, staring at Slack? Sitting in a group chat, looking at everything that happens, reading everything that happens? I'm honestly curious. Do you watch other people get work done? Maybe in yours, people just chat about weird things all the time? I just don't get it. Slack just sits there in the dock, and I don't need to keep the window open to have it remain use…
I think it's a voyeuristic tendency of some people to watch other people work. You can join a few dozen Slack channels, and peek in on them constantly, similar to twitter or reddit. Maybe a desire to find drama? Vs focus on your own "boring" problem. The funny thing is, it can make you feel productive!
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The benefit I've found is in cross-team communication. Specifically of the "I need to reach out to this team I don't know about their product" variety. A) If they interact with Slack, I can search previous answers B) It promotes a culture of openness. Huge benefit in some orgs! We talk about our projects, warts and all, in public channels. If all your org channels are private, you're definitely Doing It Wrong C) It's…
> Slack is asynchronous. You are describing a proprietary, expensive, intrusive, demanding rewrite of SMTP.
But Slack is certainly easier to install and use (by being centralized).